Whenever you are using an unencrypted connection you are a potential target for traffic sniffing. Encrypting your traffic provides enhanced privacy and additional protection from correlation/metadata attacks. Even if you do obscure your IP address your activity may still be correlated by other metadata such as browsing activity.
Essentially a metadata correlation attack works by sniffing network traffic and correlating transactions being sent from nodes. This type of attack can be enhanced by correlating browsing activity with transactions, possibly creating an opportunity to unmask the sender. By encrypting network traffic you mitigate attacks that depend on traffic sniffing because the traffic is no longer in plain text.
Projects have tried to get around these types of issues by using technology such as TOR. The only issue with this solution is that it does not address the lack of network encryption , in the first place.
DERO uses TLS encryption for it’s peer to peer connections to avoid interception of metadata. Every peer to peer connection when using DERO is encrypted at the network level . Some have claimed that this level of security is not necessary however, when security is so crucial, why not add additional protection ?
Written by @Kryptoid